Dancing on Your Own
by Belamancer
Summary: After Rose is taken away, but before he says goodbye, Doctor Ten goes to the pub. Ficlet.Originally posted in the Timeslipping LJ comm. Spoilers up to and including Doomsday.


Dancing on Your Own

The pub was empty and relatively clean, two things that the Doctor valued in a drinking establishment. The sudden disappearance of Rose had left him feeling understandably depressed, so he'd gone looking for a little self-medication. Alcohol seemed like it might do the trick.

It was working pretty well until the first time he thought he heard her voice. Being sober and sensible he didn't want to make a fool of himself by turning around, so he didn't. Just sat there and drank his beer whilst the pub slowly filled. The weather was hot and sunny outside, and the place soon filled with patrons searching for cool refreshment.

The second time he thought he heard her voice he decided that it must have been the barmaid's fault. She had shortish blonde hair, and sort of reminded him of Rose in that she was so utterly unlike his former companion she made him long with a sudden fierce sorrow to see her again.

As a punishment for pining for what he couldn't have, something he had long ago promised he would never do, he had another drink. And another. Somewhere along the line, he reasoned, he would hit the exact right number of pints to make him feel better.

It wasn't the fifth pint, of that he was certain. Downing his sixth, he thought he heard Rose laugh, and he ordered his next drink in a flurry of self-pity.

After his seventh he could no longer contain himself. When he heard that faint murmur of familiar voices again he turned around only to find that Rose was seated on her own, not two tables away from him.

He rubbed his eyes, then downed the remains of his pint. If this wasn't Rose, he was going to look pretty foolish.

"Rose! How on Earth did you get here?!" It came out sounding not at all slurred, for which he was proud, and a lot desperate, for which he wasn't. She stared at him blankly.

"Do I know you?" She wasn't being rude, obviously. Rose wasn't rude to complete strangers, and certainly not to friends. His mind raced ahead for explanations. Rose from an alternate universe? Rose after an amnesia-inducing accident? A clone of Rose designed by some ancient enemy to trap him here whilst-

His musings were cut off by the arrival of Rose's drinks, and a terribly familiar glare from the man who brought them.

Whoops.

"Ah, er. Sorry, I'll just be-"

"How did you know my name?" Damn Rose's incessant curiosity. Well, not really, but damn her timing. The Doctor's previous incarnation was giving him a funny look that made him uncomfortable, and he fuzzily thought that there must be a way to back out of this gracefully. Surely he wasn't so desperate for company as to steal it from himself.

"Um... Lucky guess?" he tried, with winning schoolboy charm. Rose giggled and previous Doctor gave him a smile that wasn't really a smile.

"Do you want to sit down?" he asked, making it painfully obvious to the current Doctor that he didn't mean at their table. Current Doctor made a show of looking over his shoulder, and shrugged.

"Looks like someone's taken my seat." he tried, cheerfully. Rose indicated the chair next to her and he sat down gratefully. It was just curiosity, that's all. And he wasn't desperate.

"So. This is Rose, I'm the Doctor." Oh Belgium, the number of times he'd said that. Never again.

Probably it was because he wasn't paying attention that he slurred;

"What a coincidence, so am I."

There was a metaphorical lowering of temperature. Rose looked between them, bewildered. Previous Doctor relaxed, finally.

"Drink?"

"Please."

At twelve pints the Doctor was certain that he'd found the exact right alcohol level to make himself feel better. Previous Doctor didn't seem to agree, but then he'd only had eight pints and clearly wasn't drunk enough for this. Current Doctor ignored him in favour of trying to teach Rose the words to a song that he assured her was an ancient drinking song, and would later remember to be the theme-tune to an as-yet unwritten soap opera.

They arrived at the TARDIS – whose he wasn't sure – only to collapse against the door laughing at one of the Doctor's own stories. It was odd, he mused, how these things changed with the telling so that what previous Doctor found to be annoying yet hysterically funny current Doctor found funny yet horribly nostalgic, so that when they finally made it into the TARDIS current Doctor found himself locked into a depressingly maudlin sense of doom. Stood there with his past self and his erstwhile companion he felt like some oppressive intruder, angel of death and doom come to take away this brief respite of happiness.

For all his dislike of mental contact, previous Doctor must have sensed it too. He jumped up suddenly, sent Rose for more drinks and grinning conspiratorially tapped a couple of panels of controls. Familiar music flooded the control room and current Doctor couldn't help but grin back as he grabbed his own hand and led himself into an enthusiastic dance.

He saw Rose return but the depression had lifted enough that he could take the drink she offered him and his dance partner without feeling the loss.

Of course, after that he didn't remember feeling much. Large quantities of alcohol will do that to a person, and it did it to him. But he remembered the main event, as it were, far too clearly for him to write it off as alcohol, or confusion or any one of those things that could make the whole thing less embarrassing.

He remembered it without prompting, when he woke up in his own TARDIS wrapped up in a leather jacket. It took a minute for him to recall why it was too big for him, and another minute to remember why, of all his clothes that he couldn't locate ( left sock, boxers, trench coat, shoes) his tie should have remained, wrapped around one wrist. He had a vague, distant memory fuzzed by beer and time of waking up covered by a trench coat that was way too small, wearing an unfamiliar sock, but of more immediate concern was a sudden hungover confusion as to whether what he'd done constituted the breakdown of the fabric of space/time.

After breakfast and a shower he decided that it hadn't, and that the incident hadn't done him any harm. He resolved to find a way to contact Rose to say goodbye as soon as possible, and then to pick up another companion. Even if it didn't do the universe any harm, only sad desperate people danced on their own. Anyway, you'd probably go blind.


End file.
